JAMES JOYCE
LIFE
•He was born in Dublin in 1882.
•He was educated at two Jesuit School and at University College Dublin, where he studied modern
languages and graduated in 1902.
•In that year he settled for some time in Paris, where he met Nora Barnacle with whom he had two
children, Giorgio and Lucia.
•Here he started working on a novel, Stephen’s Hero, later developed into A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.
•Then he moved to Rome, to Trieste, where he knew Italo Svevo and became teacher in the Berlitz
Language School, and finally to Zurich (during the First World War).
•In Rome he published the short story collection known as Dubliners.
•In Trieste he began working on his second novel, Ulysses.
•In 1923 he began working on his final novel, Finnegans Wake (1939)
•In the same year his daughter was diagnosed schizophrenic and his health began to deteriorate.
•At the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce and his family moved from Paris, where they had
settled in 1920, to Switzerland, where Joyce died after an operation on a stomach ulcer.
ACHIEVEMENT
Joyce was the perfect embodiment of the modernist artist; although he was a poet and wrote also
one play (Exiles), he is the colossus of modernist fiction.
In his works he aimed to organize reality into an aesthetically unified and perfect form.
↳ This can be seen in Dubliners, where Joyce unifies the various stories in the volume around the
theme of paralysis, shaving this condition in youth, adolescence, maturity and public life.
The work Dubliners is divided into four parts:
I. Three short stories about childhood
II. Four short stories about adolescence
III. Four short stories about mature life
IV. Four short stories about public life
A portrait of the artist as a young man is an autobiographical novel based on Joyce’s early life in Du-
blin.
Here the events of the story are not arranged in strict chronological order but follow the more unpre-
dictable pattern of the protagonist’s memory as it returns to key moments in his life.
In this work, Joyce developed his theory of the epiphany (moments of revelation caused by an object
or a particular event or action).
Most important features of his works.
•The setting of most of his works → Ireland, especially Dublin
•He rebelled against the Catholic Church
•All the facts in his narratives are explained from different points of view simultaneously#
•Greater importance given to the inner world of the characters
•Time is perceived as subjective
•His task was to render life objectively
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isolation and detach-
ment of the artist from
society
